Sociopolitical History of Statistics. The census as a dynamic element of the State-Society relationship

Abstract

The history of statistics as a discipline is a non-coherent narrative. Since Antiquity, when the census appeared as a structuring element, in the Middle Ages it disappeared, and in modernity it entered as mathematical modeling without being a link due to its methodical reduction. However, the census, allowing fluidity in events, its definition as a statistical operation and counting method dislocates in time its cognitive strategies (what to know) and action (how to know), a dislocation that prevents the required fluidity. On the other hand, the current definition of de facto and de jure census, used extensively by governmental institutions and constructed to measure one by one the relation housing-individual, encounters methodological problems making them obsolescent. But by incorporating the genitive of belonging, it takes it out of its relationship with the unit of analysis, elevating it to a sociological and anthropological category without losing its character of method par excellence of statistics, doing the same with this discipline, transforming it into a socio-political science as originally intended by German historicism, this time with its own definitions but also linking it to the sociology of law. In this article, we make this historical reconstruction pivoting on the concepts of census in fact and in law, incorporating the genitive, which roughly implies that the first is self-recognition and acceptance of the individual in a human group, and the second is the search for legitimacy, welfare, and completeness in the State through law. Thus, the census is a history of the State-society relationship.